IT WAS A DREAM SITUATION. And, in some ways, it felt like a dream in the days and months that followed Larisa Dannis’ second-place finish at the Western States 100-Mile Endurance Run in 2014. Dannis still remembers...
Articles by John Trent
Many races in California and Nevada this spring could relate to the challenges facing the 32nd annual Silver State 50/50 Endurance Runs, held on May 20 in Reno, Nevada. A record-setting northern Nevada winter battered Si...
Front-runner Jim Walmsley, his lean body strip-mined of all excess after six months of incredibly focused training, and already on course record pace, transitioned from the snow at 8,200 feet to the dirt single track lea...
Bob Shebest will be the first to tell you that he’s always on the lookout for inspirational quotes to help fuel his training and racing…and his life. Yet there is more to Shebest’s appreciation of memorable lines than...
With each passing year, it’s a race we know we shouldn’t be running. But often, against our better judgment, knowing full well the runner we were last year, or 10 years ago, or 20 years ago could be far different fro...
It was a moment Katie Grossman had anticipated for nearly seven years, since that first time she visited the Hardrock 100-miler in Silverton, Colorado. She had fallen in love with Hardrock almost before she set foot t...
Nearly four years later, the two of them are bound together, by history, and through the memory of a special, shared summer in 2013. And, when asked, both Ian Sharman and Nick Clark admit that there are times when the...
It began, as these things often do, with a conversation with a friend during a run. For nearly a year, Jeffrey Conner had been planning a run of redemption at the Wasatch 100-miler. In 2015, the rocks, altitude and re...
The lure of a fastest known time is strong these days. Facebook and Twitter feeds, particularly in the summer and fall, seem jammed with photos of runners either in the process of chasing an FKT, preparing for an FKT...
I still have the letter, though it dates back 20 years now. It was the summer of 1997, and I was a few weeks removed from my first Western States Endurance Run. I’d finished, which was normally cause for celebration....
Together, over a surprisingly frenzied weekend in late June, three runners came to represent the ultimate triumph of dreams that can be realized or be dashed at the Western States 100-Mile Endurance Run. There was the...
It’s hard to believe that Greg Soderlund has passed away and his unflappable nature, his adroit organizational skill and his calmness under pressure serving as race director of the Western States Endurance Run are just m...
Like clockwork, the two women begin the running year early in the spring, together, in the canyons of the Western States Trail. They have done this for going on seven years now, which mirrors closely the time they’ve...
Erin Strout has always given back. Most notably, during her nearly 20 years as a journalist, her altruism has come in the form of insightful writing for national publications. Her writing is reflective of who she is:...
It was only a few miles of conversation between two runners as they worked their way across a muddy mountain in northern Nevada last May. Months later, as Kaci Lickteig is asked about it, it’s clear she hasn’t forgotten...
The father had always been old school and a bit old-fashioned. He was a man who could easily handle both a stethoscope and a shotgun, his life shaped by time tending patients in emergency rooms in Roseville, California,...
A defiant growl… A sigh, tinged with momentary and fleeting disappointment… A piece of paper that had taken months to write upon… A little boy’s love of his mother… A pair of flip-flops that took their owner...
In recent years, The Silver State 50/50 Endurance Runs have earned a reputation for being warm, if not downright hot, experiences. The mid-May temperatures in Reno often rise into the mid 80s, which can lead to a soul...